Everything was in quite a soggy, muddy, grassy state but this didn't deter me as I loaded up my two panniers.

Over the course of a week I worked my way through all of the discs, separating them from their cases and booklets and cleaning everything using the shower over my bathtub. Sadly none of the booklets with the games were recoverable; they were all very soggy and beyond separating the pages - a combination of ditch-water and the decomposed ink made them quite a sludgy horrible mess and once the booklets dried out they just became blocks of cardboard. It made me think about all of the designers and work that went into creating such things, some of them were quite substantial, even though they were all mass-produced at the time.

I treated the discs carefully because I hoped they might still be useable on a working machine, and at the stage I didn't know if the previous owner had looked after them of got them scratched up to high hell.

With the console I carefully dismantled it and cleaned the plastic casing under the shower also. The RF shielding? was by now quite rusty and there was also some rust under the main circuit board, the PSU board also having some areas of concern. Why was this console even discarded; perhaps it was already faulty; perhaps it suffered from a failed optical drive laser, as I'm aware many of them have now.

With the board cleaned with isopropanol and rusty metal parts treated with rust converter, I reassembled the console, treating the ribbon cable and connectors to some contact cleaner in the process.

 
Before

After (it kind of looks more unsightly, but it should neutralise the rust_

At this point I had discovered the power LED attached to the PSU board was barely attached; it's legs suffering from corrosions, but by this point I just wanted to try the thing.

At first I tried re-soldering what I thought was the LED, but was actually the legs of its plastic shroud.

I plugged in the machine and gingerly switched on the power... nothing. There is a faint "relay" click when the power button is pressed, but nothing else.

I think my best bet is to source another Playstation, ideally being for "spares or repairs" although, again, the plague of failing lasers appears to be the common failing point and I don't know if mine is any good.

Being new to Playstations I have learned that there are a number of iterations of the original so ideally I need to find the same one.

Mine is one of the second one from the bottom of the pile above types. Are the disc drive modules interchangeable between them (and simply in a different orientation)? I don't yet know, except the early ones, like mine, have plastic 'sleds'.

Having found this console, spent the time to clean, disassemble and reassemble this console, and it being somewhat unique with its stickers, I have naturally formed a slight attachment to it and thought it would be nice to get it working, even if that meant ultimately replacing the innards if need be. The mop is still the same mop even if you replace the head and later the handle...

The discs all cleaned up well and appeared to have been well looked after, prior to being dumped at the side of the road. None were scratched at all. Would they still load? I didn't yet know. One issue I did have whilst cleaning them, was that, with half of them being Playstation Magazine discs, the "labels" on these tended to suffer from lots of little blisters as the cold shower water was applied. One one of an actual game discs did this (Resident Evil 2, but not both discs in the set). However, except for that RE2 disc, most of the ones that did 'pimple', smoothed out once dry and temperature returned to ambient. Some of the "labels" were also prone to being scratched.

I got all the discs back in their cases although they sadly now lack their booklets and (front) inserts (the tray inserts I have left in because removing the trays is a hassle since they're prone to snapping).

Conclusion:
I found a compatible Playstation on ebay that had a damaged case but was otherwise still in working order. My intention was to confirm this and swap the parts over. However, when I received it it struggled to read many of the discs and I suspected this was due to a failing laser which is the typical failing point of these consoles.

I contacted the seller and he requested I return the faulty console to him so that he could refund me. I'd hoped he might accept that the console was beyond repair and let me keep it, but that wasn't to be. However, while I was liaising with him I took the opportunity to try the disc drive from my console in his, hopeful that it might actually be one thing that was actually salvageable, but sadly not - this didn't work either. I do however have one working controller out of the pair I found.

Working Playstations are at present pretty cheap and cost little more than faulty ones so I have decided to therefore sell off what I have where possible and send the rest off for proper recycling (I've already sold off the Playstation Magazine discs and therefore made a little money for my time spent on this project).

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Disclaimer: Portions of the graphics on this page, such as the Playstation logo and menu, are from the Waybackmachine's copy of the official Playstation site from the year 2000.